Cancer is one of the most widespread and severe diseases with huge implications both in terms of human suffering and costs for national health care systems and individual patients. Among the cancer forms, the incidence of e.g. prostate cancer (CaP) and melanoma is steadily increasing around the world.
Carcinoma of the prostate is still potentially an incurable age-linked disease of unknown etiology. Descriptive epidemiology suggests that the probable causes of CaP are determined rather on environmental than genetic factors, and that dietary habits have a pronounced effect on prostate cancer incidence. “Latent disease” may actually be a result of dietary habits and life style.
Today, the standard treatment for prostate cancer involves drastic decrease in the patient's testosterone level. Earlier, this was carried out as an invasive operative treatment, in essence a castration operation. Nowadays the treatment usually is based on the administration of biologically active peptides, so called LHRH analogues, which via the pituitary gland inhibit the patient's androgen and testosterone production. Both treatments lead to a sharp decrease in the testosterone level, but the clinically positive result is only temporary, and a therapeutic effect is usually observed only for about 1-2 years. As time goes on all patients develop a hormone refractory state, during which the dramatically reduced androgen and testosterone levels cannot prevent recurrence of the disease. The standard therapies involve severe side effects coupled with deterioration of the life-quality of the cancer patient and his family. Furthermore, the treatments are very expensive, both for the national health care system and for the patient himself, and nevertheless, cure cannot be guaranteed.
Therefore, there exists a great demand for improved methods for treating cancer, which methods should be both less expensive and better tolerated by the patient.